Shutter Island could have been an entertainingly hysterical trainwreck, but
the train doesn't even leave the station.

Shutter Island it’s called. But “Shut-eye Island” would be a better title. Martin Scorsese’s follow-up to The Departed, like that film based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, is an eardrum-punishing cacophony of orchestral stabs, raging storms, metallic doors being slammed, tough guys yelling “Goddam”. Listen carefully and, in all likelihood, these will be accompanied by your own filmic conscience squealing: “Get me out of here!”

As subtle as a multi-barrel rocket launcher, it’s a chiller that’ll make you giggle, a psychological whodunnit that begs the question “Why’dyuhmakeit?” The year is 1954. The world is full of terrible things – H-bombs, North Koreans, TV – but none quite as terrible as a remote asylum off the coast of Massachusetts. This place is home to sick and violent inmates the pallor of whose skin suggests they’ve not been taking their daily vitamin intake. The worst of them is Rachel Solando, a young woman who drowned all three of her children in the family pond and still shows no remorse for the crime. Now she’s gone missing.

Onto the island have been sent two US marshals, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his sidekick Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), to see if Rachel has “evaporated through the walls” of her secure cell. The answer, it’s giving nothing away to reveal, is: no! Off they trot, armed with a seemingly infinite supply of matches to guide them whenever they encounter darkness or ragged-haired loons or colonies of rats, through howling corridors, howling woods and howling clifftops, sniffing around for evidence of misdeeds. It seems only a matter of time before the phrase “psychotropic drugs” is used. “Transorbital lobotomy” is a pleasing bonus.

Scorsese, working from Laeta Kalogridis’s script, does his best to turn the asylum into a trippy, Gothic palace of smoke and mirrors where illusion and reality, psychosis and normalcy are hard to distinguish. False leads and narrative traps rack up. The obvious villains (obvious in large part because of the clarity of their Queen’s English-infused diction) are two immaculately-tailored doctors (Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow) whose offices are lined with pictures of patients trussed up like plantation slaves. Unfortunately, anyone who has ever seen a horror film, will know from the get-go that both of them will turn out to be pussy cats.

For all the bombastic music, the sturm-und-drang lighting, the cornily expressionistic scenes in which characters turn to ash, many stretches of the film are more stagnant than dynamic. DiCaprio comes across like a child rather than the wounded soul he’s meant to be; his backstory – he saw and did bad things at Dachau – is rendered with the tact and reverence of Freddie Starr doing one of his funny Nazi routines. Top-rate actors – Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams – sputter in and out of scenes in frustratingly erratic fashion.

Anyone who’s caught the trailers for Shutter Island will know what an entertainingly batshit and hysterical trainwreck the film could have been, a vast pile-up of pop psychology, B-movie tropes, and weirdly-accented A-listers slumming it. Alas, the train doesn’t even leave the station.